Scientific Inquiry Definition: How the Scientific Method Works

Scientific inquiry is a form of problem-solving and questioning that helps people come to a greater understanding of observable phenomena. An understanding of this style of scientific reasoning forms the basis upon which the nature of science itself rests. Once you become familiar with scientific inquiry, you can use it for specifically science-related study or as just one additional tool in your arsenal of critical thinking skills.

Teaching science means ensuring learners understand how to conduct qualitative and inquiry-based learning. Science teachers must utilize a pedagogy that foregrounds hypothesizing, experimenting, and drawing on other scientific knowledge in both theoretical and practical ways.

Educational research indicates that it can help students see the correlation between scientific inquiry and everyday life, whether in elementary school or high school. This sort of analogization helps people understand that a scientific frame of thinking is quite intuitive when you observe it within more commonplace parameters.

As a simplistic example, imagine a student has a hard time understanding the effect of heat as an abstract force. Allowing them to observe the degree to which bread burns at different temperatures in a toaster would help make the point clear in a more hands-on way.

From encouraging scientific questions to facilitating well-reasoned conclusions, the scientific inquiry process helps illuminate our understanding of the world. Here are seven core elements to the scientific inquiry process:

1. 1. Asking constant questions: At the center of both the scientific method and general scientific inquiry lies the ability to ask questions well. Make observations about a particularly interesting phenomenon and then pose questions about why such a thing happens. Let preexisting scientific theories guide your questioning, but keep in mind every theory continues to be just that—a theory—until scientific inquiry definitively proves or disproves it.
2. 2. Testing your inferences: Scientific progress hinges on your ability to experiment and test inferences about evidence. To do so, you need to set up an independent variable (something you will use to test) and a dependent variable (the thing or things you are testing). Seeing how well your inferences or predictions match up with the reality of a given experiment is essential to scientific inquiry.
3. 3. Making connections: As you make observations about a specific phenomenon, make connections with every other relevant topic you can remember from your past science lessons or research. Scientific knowledge is as much a result of old realizations as it is of new discoveries.
4. 4. Seeking evidence: As you seek to understand the natural world, there’s no substitute for hard evidence. Collect data and gather evidence relentlessly throughout your scientific investigations. The more evidence you have to answer your initial questions, the more ironclad your ultimate case will be when you draw conclusions.
5. 5. Classifying data correctly: Science is as much a process of data collection and classification as it is of asking and answering questions. This means knowing how to elucidate or graph out your discoveries in a way other people can understand. It also means using citations from other scientific journals and texts to bolster your ultimate argument as to why a particular phenomenon occurs.
6. 6. Drawing conclusions: Eventually, you need to draw conclusions from the data you collect. After you’ve made an exhaustive study of your specific focus, use inductive reasoning to make sense of all the new evidence you’ve gathered. Scientific ideas are always malleable and never completely concrete—alternative explanations are always possible, and new evidence should lead to new questions and conclusions.
7. 7. Sharing findings: Science is an innately group-centered discipline. The more people interpret data, the better chance there is to ensure there are no loopholes in new research. No one person’s understanding of science content is infinite, so it’s important to let other qualified people ask questions of your conclusions. Natural science is more of a never-ending collaborative process than one with a concrete point of termination.

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